A Voice For Employees and Customers
by K.C. Neel -- Multichannel News, 11/16/2008 7:00:00 PM
Jill Campbell has worked for Cox Communications pretty much her entire career and wouldn't have it any other way.
She started out in public relations in Oklahoma City in 1982, but then-boss Curt Hockemeier advised her to get an MBA and move into operations. It wouldn't be the first time one of her superiors had faith in Campbell's abilities to excel and lead.
“I owe my career to his belief in me,” Campbell said. “At the time, there was only one woman general manager at the company. When he left to go to Harvard, he let me run the system while he was gone. I liked it — a lot.”
Not long after that, the general manager position in Bakersfield, Calif., opened up and Campbell was off and running. She hasn't looked back since.
Campbell later served as general manager in Santa Barbara, Calif.; vice president of customer operations in Phoenix; and vice president and general manager of the Las Vegas operation.
That promotion, in 1998, proved that you can go home again. Campbell is a Las Vegas-area native and graduated from the University of Nevada. In 2001, she was promoted to vice president of Cox's Central Division.
Today, Campbell serves as senior vice president of Eastern Division operations, responsible for overseeing the operations of systems serving 2.1 million customers.
“I had a lot of mentoring and tools I needed to get ahead,” she said. “I think a lot of Cox's philosophy of mentoring and helping women up the pipeline comes from the fact that Cox Enterprises is owned by women [the Kennedy Cox family].
“They have spent a lot of time on inclusion and the company is so employee-oriented. We're all just part of the family,” she added. “We all have a bias toward inclusion, and not just with people we're comfortable or familiar with. It's our responsibility to bring people from the bottom up.”
She counts her counterpart, Western Division senior vice president Claus Kroeger, as one of her strongest and most supportive mentors.
“He's always been there for me and always knows the answer or the tone to take for any given situation,” she said.
Campbell knows women in the organization look to her for inspiration and guidance and she loves that responsibility. She is often mentioned as a mentor by company peers and as inspiration for moving up the ladder while maintaining family balance. She can speak about what it's like to be a working parent and the trials of wanting to advance, but needing to uproot one's family and move across the country more than once to make that happen.
“As a leader in our organization, one of Jill's greatest strengths is her connectivity to people at all levels in the company,” said Cox CEO Pat Esser. “She is often the voice of employees and customers in our strategic decision-making.”
“I'll talk to anyone, anytime as they grapple with advancing up the ladder and moving ahead,” Campbell said. “The best thing we can do is invest time and money in our young leaders. We have to give them the training and tools and we have to find them formal mentors they can count on for guidance. We have formal career paths here at Cox with formal yearly reviews that help all employees plan their career paths.”
Campbell believes lifestyle choices are difficult for both men and women but traditionally, women have followed their husband's careers, putting theirs in second place or on hold altogether. She credits her husband, attorney Richard, for being flexible enough to follow her as she moved from one position to the next.
“My hero is my husband,” Campbell said. “He has been a stable force for me throughout my entire career. He had been a partner in a law firm and he'd done the corporate thing. He was willing to follow me. And he was quite the trouper.
“He passed five different law bars. He basically raised the kids and he's been incredibly supportive the whole time. I wouldn't have been able to do this without him.”
Campbell understands the need for preparing the best and the brightest from their earliest stages of employment. Some of the biggest roadblocks in advancing women in business — including resistance to change at the top — have largely been overcome in the cable industry, she said. The biggest stumbling block for women wanting to advance in cable operations today is their inability to be mobile.
“If you want to advance, you have to be willing to move,” she said, noting that's often easier said than done. Still, it's possible.
Today, six — or fully one-third — of Cox's regional vice presidents/general managers are women. “These women are running very large operations and have full P&L responsibilities. We've come a long way. I know the industry has a way to go, but strides and opportunities are being made for those wanting to take hold of them.”
Campbell takes very seriously her role as a mentor and industry leader. She understands the need for companies to be more flexible in what is important to employees and notes that is different for both older and younger staffers as well as men and women. “We have a lot of 1396927554
women in marketing, human-resources and public-relations roles,” she said. “But those are traditionally roles that have been dominated by women. We don't see enough women in roles with P&L responsibility. Our senior teams in the industry aren't very multicultural yet and it's the senior executives' responsibility to make sure we have more women and people of color at the top.
“You have to start people early so they are prepared to take on the top-level jobs,” added Campbell. “As people retire or leave, we need to make sure we have good, talented people to take their place.”
The daughter of a college professor and an elementary school teacher, training and teaching are in Campbell's genes. She studied guidance and counseling in college. Although she knew she didn't want to pursue that as a career, the education would come in handy as she traversed the country and climbed the corporate ladder at Cox.
After graduating, Campbell headed to California where she landed an entry-level job in marketing and advertising at Phase Com, a manufacturer of equipment for the cable industry.
“My dad got me that job,” Campbell admits. “I didn't know anything about the cable industry, but I was the Vanna White of cable shows. I'd show off equipment all day.”
She moved to Oklahoma City a year later and took her first PR job with Cox. Her cable career had taken a dramatically different turn and Campbell couldn't be happier about the outcome.
Her early successes in Bakersfield, Santa Barbara and later Las Vegas are indicative of her ability to take on challenges and excel. When she took the reins of the Las Vegas operation, it was rife with problems. The plant needed to be upgraded to 750 Megahertz; customer service was lagging; defections to satellite TV were on the rise. At the same time, new residents were streaming into the market and it was difficult to keep up with the demand for service.
In two years, the system was required to pass more than 74,000 new residential units. Between 1999 and the end of 2000, the Las Vegas system grew from 298,000 customers to 368,000 and nearly 90,000 of them signed up for digital service under Campbell's watch.
“Jill is a dynamo and one of Cox's greatest assets,” Esser said. “It's hard to think of anyone who is a better embodiment of Cox's culture — deeply committed to our employees, focused on customers and fiercely competitive.
“Often referred to as fearless, Jill has, many times in her career, embraced change not knowing fully what to expect, but confident in taking the calculated risk. Along the way, she's served the company when and where we've needed her and gathered experiences that have enriched her and set the example for other women in cable. We're so proud to see Jill receive this richly deserved recognition as WICT's Woman of the Year.”
Campbell may stay busy at work, but she is also active outside the office. She has served as a board member for a number of nonprofit organizations including United Way, Boys & Girls Club of America and the YMCA. She also served on the boards of the California, Arizona and Nevada cable television associations. Campbell was honored in 2000 by the Las Vegas Business Journal as one of the most influential women in Southern Nevada. She was also named to the 2002 class of Multichannel News Wonder Women. In 2004, Campbell was the recipient of the Atlanta WICT Woman of the Year Award and became the chairperson of the WICT Foundation Board in 2006.
Campbell never imagined she would end up where she is today. “Getting to this level and loving every minute of it is so rewarding,” she said. “It also wonderful to know that our employees know we support them and realize that we really do care about them.
”I've had some customer service reps I knew 10 or 20 years ago e-mail me to tell me how great it was to see my latest promotion. It was fantastic that they remembered me. But it was also wonderful that they realized a woman can rise to the top.”
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